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How does the ill-fated story that launched the career of Ralph Nader relate to the demise of Harley Earl: The Father of the Modern Car? Lawyer
and consumer activist, Ralph Nader, published Unsafe At Any Speed in
1965, a withering indictment of the safety record of American automakers,
especially General Motors. Nader even vilified Harley Earl and his design staff in
particular for their work on the flawed Chevrolet Corvair --- an ironic choice
of targets after it came to light in the media that GM brass used blackmail like
tactics in the early 1960s to discredit Nader. General Motors was then implicated
(click PDF news story shown directly below) for hiring
private detectives to dig up dirt on Nader, but the strategy backfired when
Nader sued GM for invasion of privacy. GM president James M. Roche and Fredrick Donner,
GM’s CEO, were forced to
make an embarrassing public apology. The following quote on the settlement is
provided from Ralph Nader's Wikipedia site; "Upon learning of GM's
actions, Nader successfully sued the company for invasion of privacy, forced it to publicly apologize, and used much of his $284,000
net settlement to expand his consumer rights efforts. Nader's lawsuit against GM
was ultimately decided by the New York Court of Appeals, whose opinion in the case expanded tort law to cover
'overzealous surveillance.' " Nader has since made three
unsuccessful runs for the presidency of the United States.
The reason GM’s top brass knew the Nader ploy would work flawlessly was because the selfsame shakedown tactic ousted Harley Earl just a few years prior. President Jack Gordon, CEO Fred Donner and their designer Bill Mitchell knew if their scheme had toppled the Father of the Modern Car's tradition of constant "change and modernization" dead in its tracks, it would pluck Nader from the scene just as fast.
At the end of the 1950s, millions of Americans were addicted to Earl's rolling works of art that were simply everywhere. Back then, many general audience members knew a thing or two on Earl being some kind of hero in Americana. In the eye of the auto journalistic community, GM's new leaders of the early 1960s began to change and slant the perception on Designer-Earl after having wrestled the controlling power seat (behind the look and feel of all GM's cars) away from Earl and his design department. That's when these rogue leaders started throwing away GM's time-tested progressive "design driven" business paradigm so they could direct the controlling interest behind all the money that had been going to Earl's design team and department. And after Earl died ten years later in 1969, instead of these execs paying homage to this auto pioneer or giving him a posthumous victory, these GM bean counters went the other way and entirely began to change Earl's role in GM history. Washing away his artistic engineering mark on the American auto scene and marginalizing Earl's towering business accomplishments became the norm and rather than legitimizing his business accomplishments in academia and the business world, GM's upper echelon fabricated the historic records to make themselves look good! Where's Earl's title today as being the "father of the modern car " in as far as history is concerned? Buried! The above 1969 cover title of this 12-page rotogravure story can not be easily erased and is a perfect example elaborating the extent of Earl's auto legacy today. As time began to pass, GM's new leaders cleverly steered the story telling piece of the historic pie around Earl's giant GM contributions into sounding like the current GM executive administration crew were the one's responsible. And by the time of GM's 75th anniversary in 1983, the world's largest company had legions of auto journalists and business historians in their back pocket to prolong slanting and turning around Earl's "art in industry GM business paradigm" upside down to where it sounding like Earl was some bit player. Nobody did it better than GM's early 1980s CEO Roger Smith, who is known today for gutting so many important things from GM. Why then -- on a much closer examination of this historic record -- is it so hard to believe this greedy executive also did a major number on tainting and fabricating so many historic facts behind Detroit's auto design world legacy? These were dark times, for many Americas began to simply buy what Smith was saying and/or just distance themselves from this company and the champion founder (Harley Earl and his driven-by-design sales leadership role) behind supremely cementing GM near a 50% market share level. By the early 1990s, many of the important facts on how Earl first invented the success behind Detroit's dependency on design business model had been buried and this is when Earl's story started to become a lost legacy inside GM and to the American public. Afterwards, seeing who the real Harley Earl was in auto history became GM's bean counters had spent millions by this time cooking their company's history books (by the way, no one has ever gone to jail in America's big business world, or on Wall St. for cooking a corporation's history books...but maybe that should change now)? This is why such a small audience today in America and the rest of the world hardly care to understand how Harley Earl invented the Automobile Design profession in the first place. This is a huge business world accomplishment in history and it's even written that way in stone within Detroit's archival world...if you know which archive to look in. This is one of the primary reasons GM and Detroit was in such a heap of trouble at the end of the twentieth century. At that time, you could go around and interview Detroit's top auto execs and hardly any of them knew Harley Earl had invented the Automobile Design Profession in America. That's because GM massacred and ate it's golden goose and very few big named American historians or business professors at major US institutions knew anything about the inside track behind Detroit's Dependency on Design. Thankfully, maligning the history behind GM Design (Harley Earl's legacy) is on the downswing since the formation of the new GM in the forth quarter of 2010, but the new GM is very much connected to the old GM, so much work needs to be done in order to making Earl's business-art story flourish instead of languish. Even at GM's 100th birthday in September 2008 (right when this company was first hitting the bankruptcy wall) GM's PR dictum the GM Design history and Earl's legacy was downright vague, false and misleading. Sadly, millions of Americans just look the other way when GM history is brought up today. Why did the illuminating history on the man who toppled Henry Ford never flow outside of Detroit's insular world? Simply put, the powers that be at the top of GM and Motown's richest family (Ford descendants) clearly had another agenda: meticulously control the flow of all information related to Harley Earl milestones and/or inventions. One reason being, these were some of the hottest promotional diamonds related to the American auto industry's modern history, and Detroit's cream of the crop had every intention of spinning things "their way in the media" to ride on the glowing coat tails of this one past leader's victories in business success. Not much has changed in Detroit since the 1960s for the most powerful leaders in Detroit today (especially the top cadre at GM in 2007) are cut from the same cloth of traitorous demagogues who prematurely terminated Harley Earl's leading vision back in 1958. This section of the website provides proof positive the central character of the American auto industry's meteoric rise "behind the modern" was deceptively withheld from ever reaching the public domain. Yes, it is true, Harley Earl made Henry Ford's old fashion utilitarian auto building ways obsolete. Some historians credit Earl and understand the history this way, "Harley Earl was first to introduce forks and knives to Detroit's auto world starting in the late 1920s when he initiated a whole new modern pattern of auto building...since that time, it has revolutionized the entire auto world." But, very few people in this country actually know any facts on the inside track of the business world story of Harley Earl. What follows shows why this story is Detroit's dirtiest secret and why they would prefer it stay buried moving forward. Of course, the legendary betrayal story of Harley Earl connects to the very top of the American business world and that's the primary reason it has stayed suppressed for so long. Of course another detail behind why the story never came forward has to do with the fact Harley Earl was mighty embarrassed by being a recipient of a treacherous shakedown by the very GM leaders he had in fact help make! Irvin
W. Rybicki painted the best picture why all of GM's CEOs over the last fifty odd
years have participated in a massive distortion and/or deception of American
business history. Mr. Rybicki was a 42-year GM
veteran who worked under Earl and, later on, became the third vice president of
GM Design (1977-1986). His statements were gathered in various taped interviews: "Harley Earl is responsible for more than half of GM's greatest 20th Century milestones. The fact this company had exclusivity of all his work and was able to capitalize off his artistic efforts and innovative engineering ideas first, is why this man's story is so controversial and a kept secret today in Detroit."
Look at the above chart...GM and Detroit's forward momentum and progress were never supposed to be severely halted! Whereby, a historic decade-after-decade downslide began and has now prevailed into the beginning of the 21st century auto world. Something really big, negative and highly controversial happened "behind-the-scenes" in Detroit's business world that has never before been publicly fleshed out or shared. The betrayal of Harley Earl story had vast and outreaching consequences that no doubt affected America's "big business" world over the last half century.
How do the Fords (Detroit’s wealthiest family of the 20th Century) play into this plot? When
Ford family members witnessed "GM's cooking the history books" leading
up to General Motors 75th birthday in 1983 (the infamous GM CEO,
Roger Smith, was in charge of this stratagem) many Fords saw this as an
excellent opportunity to leverage and elevate the “Henry Ford” brand relating directly to
modern automobile history. Not surprisingly, Harley Earl was the fall guy. Being
the
largest shareholders of Ford Motor Co., Ford descendants went on to spin around
in their pot (via having the director of the Henry Ford Museum in their pocket)
some of the most glamorous modern American auto history and milestones. How did GM become the No. 1 auto maker in the modern era (last 75 years of auto history)? Through design, and that's Harley Earl's story. See, GM's financial leaders today don't want Earl's authentic business story to be scholarly broken down, analyzed and fundamentally shared because it implicates and exposes the entire cast of characters (including all GM's ex-CEOs dating back to 1958) who were responsible for landing America's largest company of the 20th century, General Motors, in the position of becoming the No. 2 auto maker in the world behind the foreign auto concern Toyota in April, 2007.
Again, this
extremely negative story took hold fifty years ago; now this massive fraud is finally unfolding. Detroit has an iron grip on Earl's
business story (they view it as their dirtiest business secret), and of course never want it to escape. Naturally,
it's at the heart
of why the U.S. Auto scene is a shambles today and
none of the players behind this ongoing collapse ever want the truth to be
exposed on the man who was supposed to continue being the chief architect of
GM's rise in the future, starting in the 1960s, when this company would begin
manufacturing millions of more economical fuel efficient small cars for
Americans.
Thankfully, things have been changing over the last 5-years relating to the history books. Harley Earl is beginning to be recognized as making GM No. 1 in the modern era. This groundswell is coming from grass root auto collectors and thousands of others within America's titanic car culture who simply know Harley Earl was Detroit's greatest contemporary artist/engineer impresario who ever lived. More proof positive: in the last 3-years, Designer-Earl motoramic masterpieces have had a huge spike and now sell for millions of dollars at auction. This further substantiates this man's authentic story vs. the trumped up incorrect perception GM's financial leaders and some of Detroit's most powerful men have spun into circulation over the last fifty odd years. GM's CEO, Rick Wagoner, know the tight lid on this man's design/engineering story diminishing will provide new evidence as to why GM's current leaders caused a massive fraud in American history that bankrupted the largest company of the all time.
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